Link
to my corpus playlist
I have chosen 10 bands, 5 of which are not considered metal bands and 5
of which are considered metal bands. My goal is to see how easily
distinguishable these genres actually are if we looked at the Spotify
statistics.
The non-metal bands I picked are: Queens of the Stone Age, Radiohead,
Queen, Led Zeppelin and Arctic Monkeys.
The metal bands I picked are: Metallica, Death, Gojira, Opeth and
TOOL.
For both groups I tried to pick bands that sound as distinct as possible
from eachother, however this list is definitely too limited to provide a
complete overview of both genres. The non-metal bands I chose are varied
enough but still don’t provide an overview of the genre in its entirety
and 3 of the 5 metal bands I chose fall into different categories of the
death metal subgenre.
For the rock songs I mainly focused on somewhat high tempo guitar
based music, to make the distinction between metal and rock as hard as
possible. Some Queen and Radiohead songs are obvious exceptions to this,
however I feel these are still interesting to analyse as they often have
shifting dynamics, or they can provide a baseline to define a non-metal
rock song. Queens of the Stone Age is the non-metal band that comes
closest to being a metal band, but I decided not to include their actual
metal songs. Led Zeppelin is often credited for at least partially
inspiring the metal genre.
For the metal songs I picked songs that are unmistakably metal.
Metallica is an obvious inclusion, however I only added songs from their
thrash metal era. Death and Gojira fit the bill as well.
Queens of the Stone Age - ‘My God is the Sun’; Heavy non-metal
song.
Radiohead - ‘Paranoid Android’; Alternates between soft rock parts and
chaotic loud solos.
Led Zeppelin - ‘Immigrant Song’; Considered “proto-metal”, influential
on the genre.
Opeth - ‘The Leper Affinity’; Good example of Opeth’s dynamics.
TOOL - ‘Bottom’ and ‘Ticks & Leeches’; Both songs have very quiet
build-up parts in the middle.
By looking at this plot it’s very clear to see that the songs in the
metal part of the playlist are a lot more clustered toward high energy
and low valence. The rock songs seem to be a lot more scattered, which
could be explained by the variety of rock subgenres in that part of the
playlist.
From these variables it’s hard to make a clear distinction between
genres, as both seem to follow a similar distribution. Rock music’s
danceability seems to be slightly higher on average, but the tempo of
the songs in both genres varies wildly.